An enterprise application is a set of workloads (e.g., computing, networking, and storage) that are generally distributed across various nodes (or endpoints) of a network and the relationships (e.g., connectivity, dependencies, network and security policies, etc.) between the workloads. A typical application may include a presentation tier, an application tier, and a data tier. The presentation tier may depend on the application tier and authentication services, and the application tier may depend on the web tier and external network services (e.g., a travel reservation system, an ordering tool, a billing tool, etc.). These tiers may further depend on firewall, load balancing, wide area network (WAN) acceleration, and other network services. An enterprise can include hundreds or thousands of applications of similar and different architectures.
An expansive or thorough understanding of a data center and applications running in the data center can be critical for network management tasks such as anomaly detection (e.g., network attacks and misconfiguration), asset management (e.g., monitoring, capacity planning, consolidation, migration, and continuity planning), and compliance (e.g. conformance with governmental regulations, industry standards, and corporate policies). Despite the complexities of the interrelationships among workloads discussed above, the traditional approaches for developing insight into an enterprise's workloads require comprehensive knowledge on the part of human operators and processes that are manual and largely customized for a particular enterprise. Automation of application dependency mapping (ADM) may be preferred because manual procedures often require a substantial degree of expertise yet may still be highly susceptible to error. Further, the evolving practices of modern data centers (e.g., virtualization, cloud computing, support for the Internet of Things (IoT), etc.), the increasing number and complexity of threats against networks, and new regulatory regimes that impose ever harsher penalties on non-compliant corporations demand new solutions for network management in the data center.